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Positive Attitude Gets a Bad Rap


I ran across a blog post of a woman questioning the feasibility of a positive outlook while going through hard or tragic times.

We are often sold a load of newborn diaper doo when it comes to attitude and reality and how one affects the other. The whole Oprah induced “secret” frenzy set the lucky ducks to head nodding like bobble heads in the rear window of a Pinto and made everyone else feel like a colossal failure at best and cursed by the gods at worst.

There is no reason NOT to attempt a positive outlook in the face of disasters, but reality is reality. Sometimes it will bite your head off if you let your vision cloud over in rosy hues.

A positive attitude can concede points to a dismal reality and still be a useful, worthwhile exercise that will certainly take a person farther than pessimism, anger, blame, defeatism and any other favorite shoulder shrugging, curling into a fetal position posture a person might favor in bleak times.

I went with positive in my own situation with the whole dying husband thing. He’d lost his job due to his illness right before we moved into a larger home with its bigger matching mortgage. I made up my mind early that coming out on the other side and being happy (that being relative) was where I had to focus, or I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed every morning.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t complain or despair or stomp my feet. I would sometimes no sooner solve a dilemma – like needing a daycare for my blind, demented 29-year-old husband – when I was confronted with another problem, but I took things as they came, played it where it laid and tried to focus on the long-term whenever I could. It’s not a perfect plan and I employed it imperfectly just as often as I hit the ball out of the park.

What I think is meant by maintaining a positive outlook during hard times is to just try to balance one’s outlook to mostly err on the side of “everything’s eventually going to be okay”. It does not mean ignoring issues or denying that sometimes it’s hard to be upbeat when the world is raining steadily on your parade while everyone around you seems to be walking on sunshine while draped in rainbows. Being sad, upset, and angry happens. It’s better to admit to and feel these things than stuff them away because they won’t stay where they are stuffed no matter how clever a packer you are. But it does no good to wallow in the negative and allow setbacks and tragedy to define your life or person.

Can you be positive in hard times?

Yes, you can within moderation but isn’t that true of all things?

Sunday Morning with Rob and Me


Sundays are lazy. None of that scrambling to your choice of worship theatres for us. Late rising, leisurely breakfast – never empty tea cups and conversation defines the morning for Rob and me.

As we usually do, we share information gleaned over the last several days that hadn’t already been featured as a topic of interest in our conversations. We are news junkies. I mostly Internet and he a combination of the web and talk radio.

Today I brought up a Business Week article by Amanda Bennett where she details the financial end of her husband’s seven-year battle with kidney cancer. It cost $618, 616 to prolong his life with 2/3rds of that expense settling in the last 24 months – when virtually everything that took place, did nothing.

Two things struck me about Bennett’s quite well-written article:

1) She admits that she was unaware of the true cost of her husband’s illness in terms of dollars because their insurance coverage really only presented them with bills for co-pays. It made it seem like a bargain when looking only at their out-of-pocket.

2) Even knowing that the last leg of her husband’s illness – in terms of treatments tried – was a waste of time that probably diminished his quality of life – she wouldn’t change a thing if she could do it again.

Oh, and just as an aside, she writes about dumping an opened bottle of one of the potent cancer drugs he was taking down the bathroom drain after he died. WTF?? Seriously? So wrong. Where was hospice? Obviously not doing their job.

Rob and I come to the terminal illness things from different perspectives – kinda. His wife was able to make her own decisions whereas my husband was mentally incapacitated and all decision-making fell on me. There was a tiny glimmer of hope for Shelley. Will never had a chance regardless.

So Rob can play devil’s advocate to my hard-earned position on illnesses that are inevitably terminal. What do I think is terminal? Anything where the odds are fifty-fifty or worse. North American mindset dictates fight no matter what it costs in terms of money and the emotional well-being of your loved ones, but I think you have to take into account the long-term toll. If you love your spouse and kids, how can you do otherwise?

Of course, I am of the belief that death is not evil, unfair and frightening – which is how it is regarded in the West. Death is. Like life is. I exist in either mode though I am beginning to wonder about what constitutes life really. If I always exist then am I not technically always alive albeit sometimes not corporeally?

Rob and I have some heavy Sunday morning brekkie discussions.

He doesn’t like to show his cards much on this. Shelley fought tooth and nail in the face of extremely bleak odds. A realistic person might say that she never stood a chance at all really. I would not want to say that perhaps her time would have been better spent traveling the world with her husband and girls and making the most of what was left. There is/should be choice.

Will wanted to fight. He didn’t understand that there was nothing to fight with. The only option – bone marrow transplant – would have just killed him sooner or left him as mentally/physically ravaged as he was just before he died.

I was selfish in the eyes of his family and friends because I looked closely at the odds and the long-term and decided that sacrificing the present and the future wasn’t the best option for Dee and I. Will would die no matter what. What was left for me to decide was how much physical hell I would let the medical profession put him through and how much of my life and Dee’s life I was willing to trash in the process. I decided – not much. The whole thing was lose-lose and it was up to me to minimize damage as much as possible.

Had we discovered his illnesses even a year earlier, Will would have decided otherwise. He’d have opted to risk the early death and even the mental and physical disabilities to stay alive. To be with me. To be at least sort of around for Dee. The fact that this would have strained me – even more because he would still be alive and in my care as I type this – wouldn’t have mattered to anyone but me. Wedding vows have hidden consequences.

But it would have been his decision. I wouldn’t have influenced him even if I knew the cost in full.

“I hope, ” I told Rob, “that if I were to ever be in a place where death was mostly likely that I would base my decision on what to do next on what would be best in the long-term for you and the girls.”

I don’t know if I am that strong at present, but I am working on it.

Lot’s Wife


Once, when I foolishly allowed Q&A from the dear readership, Sally asked me if I ever pondered a future where Will hadn’t died. Hadn’t been sick at all in fact.

Truthfully, I hadn’t and still don’t see the point of such an exercise though I know that it is a common one among widowed folk.

But I was talking with my BFF tonight, making plans for an upcoming trip down south and she mentioned that Will’s best friend, Wally and his wife Cherish were struggling to pay for their son’s funeral last month. I’d mentioned at the time that I planned to send a donation but there wasn’t a fund set up to send anything to, so I hadn’t done anything about it yet.

To be more honest, I discovered that shortly after the funeral Wally made a point of asking BFF’s husband to take him to visit Will’s grave and it peeved me a bit. Not that Wally made the visit. As I understand it, Wally stages regular pilgrimages to the cemetery to see Will. What grates is that he shows more devotion to the rock I buried Will under than to Will’s daughter – his goddaughter, who he hasn’t bothered to inquire about personally for the last three years.

Now that I have gotten that petty digression off my chest, there is a fund-raising effort underway to help with the expenses. Cherish contacted BFF’s husband and told them that the funeral home had given them 30 days to pay off the $12,000 they’d spent.

How they managed to rack up such a bill, BFF didn’t know. Having dealt with these funeral home people, I don’t have the same difficulty imagining it. I do, however, wonder why the funeral home extended any credit at all to a couple who’d recently declared bankruptcy for the second time.

Money is to be sent to BFF’s hubby and he will cash checks and turn it into a money order to send to Wally and Cherish – as their bank is no longer on good enough terms with them to allow for checks to be made out directly to them*.

I told Rob about the conversation later in the evening and admitted that if there was a hell – and I am certain that’s just a Catholic wives’ tale – I would burn in it for my thoughts about the whole situation.

“If Will was still alive,” I said, “I’d be up to my neck in the whole sordid affair trying to keep him from spending our money to bail them out.”

Rob just circled his arms around me, drew me close and said,

“Yeah, you are so going to hell.”

“Maybe not though,” I said. “He’d be 35. He could have outgrown that high school blind loyalty thing.”

“No,” Rob said, “he wouldn’t have.”

Damn, my husband is good. He knows me and he knows Will through me.

But he was right, I’d have spent the last month alternating between guilt and anger trying to reign in Will’s insane devotion to friendship regardless of reality.

Think not?

BFF regaled me with accounts of the funeral. Will’s buddies gathered to be pall bearers. They carpooled to the visitation and then headed off to the hotel where they proceeded to party all night like it was a high school reunion. Not one of them offered to help BFF’s hubby out when it came time to pay for the rooms nor did they offer any assistance to Wally and Cherish.

All but one or two of them have donated to the current fundraising effort. I guess it should go without saying that not one of them asked me if I needed help paying for Will’s visitation or burial. I did, but my aunt helped me out without even having to be asked. She wouldn’t even discuss my paying her back.

So, I guess Sally, I do sometimes play out current day scenarios with Will in them. Usually when something/one from the past disturbs my present. His friends get married or experience tragedy. His mother or aunt sends a card and asks for pictures that I sent already but just haven’t arrived there due to the paranoia at the border thing. When the past intrudes, I wonder what life would be like. Look like. What he would be like as a 36 year old man because I have nothing to base this on as he was 28 when he was diagnosed and effectively ceased to exist as the man I knew. It’s quite the gap to fill and my fiction instincts err on the side of the awful for some reason. I never imagine hearts, flowers and perfection like many widowed do.

*Or so she says. I know way more about their finances than I need to due to the fact that Cherish’s younger sister worked at the health club I went to back in Des Moines and her sister … had a big, indiscreet mouth. If my sister shared that much information about me with strangers, there would be consequences. Let’s just say that the whole story is fishy. Can a couple declare bankruptcy twice in four years?”